Open letter to the world’s gullible idiots

"If you say gullible slowly it sounds like oranges"

You’re probably reading this in the waiting room of your homeopathic doctor’s clinic. We know you picked up the magazine so you could stifle the dread from your last tarot reading, after the rooibos tea you bought off a late-night infomercial didn’t calm you down. We can only hope your psychic warned you about us before she was run down by the car she never saw coming.

We know why your savings account is empty. You once received an email from someone pretending to be the son of a deposed Middle-Eastern dictator and you jumped at the chance to help him. They promised to give you so much money, you could dive into it like a desi Scrooge McDuck and you leapt at the chance to save them. You didn’t even think this through, did you? Even a child knows you don’t share your bank account details with strangers on the internet. But you thought one of Hosni Mubarak’s children would contact you to get their ill-begotten wealth out of the country? Did you think such a huge amount of money appearing in your bank account wouldn’t be noticed by your intelligence agencies? That the guys who have secret access to the camera taking your colonoscopy wouldn’t find out about your little laundering operation?

Remember that time you sent your mate several hundred pounds because he emailed you saying he had lost his wallet in London? You didn’t think to call him first, then found out he was at home sleeping when someone hacked his email password. You’ve never been good at noticing weird URL extensions of popular websites – “citbank.co.rednet” and shit like that. And while you’re only getting more gullible as you age, the scamsters are getting smarter.

It’s 2016. Things are even more insidious now. After that initial dopamine rush from seeing a very sexy woman request your friendship on Facebook, have a quick look at her vacant, 1-day old profile with 15 very target-audience male friends. Stop your rationalization. There is ZERO chance she just thought you looked cute in your profile picture.

But if one of these beauties proves irresistible, and you suddenly find yourself receiving affectionate messages from an East European actress wanting to start a romance with you that involves a Western Union money transfer, then we’ve got some bad news. She’s actually some dude sitting in a ramshackle spam farm in Guangzhou. The money you’re going to send for a ticket to your home country is going to buy him a couple RAM modules for his ancient 486. You’re better off trying your luck left-swiping randomly at profiles on Tinder.

All that these assholes have to do is tell you how you’re a special snow flake, and you fall in love with them. This is why you need us. Only we can protect poor gullible you from all the scamsters of the world. And the only things we need from you to accomplish that is your bank account number, your mother’s maiden name and your birth date. You’re such a special person and we love you with all our heart. So trust us, babe. We’ll keep you safe.